May 29, 2007 | Tuesday
The importance of organic search
By Richard Gregory - COO in Search Engines |Search Research |SEO
TWO recent news stories have helped to shine a light on the true worth of natural search.
First, price comparison website moneysupermarket.com, reported to be readying itself for a stock market flotation, suddenly found it had been dropped from Google’s top natural results for searches on bread-and-butter words and phrases such as ‘loans’ and ‘car insurance’.
Then, just as the insurance group Admiral was said to be preparing a £700 million sale of confused.com, the online car insurance comparison service vanished from Google’s natural rankings.
As well as dealing a less than welcome blow to their respective corporate strategies, both cases illustrate the absolute importance of search engine optimisation.
Take Moneysupermarket. Originally created purely for financial services products, it now offers to compare prices for just about every imaginable product and service. Hence it’s vital the site enjoys a permanent, prominent place at the top of the results pages generated by someone searching for… well, just about anything really.
The same goes for confused.com, for which a top slot on any results page related to searches for car insurance is a must.
True, this could be achieved via a well planned and executed paid search campaign. But increasingly, companies are learning to view natural search as an essential complement to their paid search listings. In large part this is based on the notion that consumers now look to natural results for endorsement of a website’s paid listing as much as they do information.
The need continually to optimise websites like Moneysupermarket and confused is a bit like painting the Forth Bridge. The paint does more than simply improve the look of the bridge. It also helps to protect and preserve the underlying raw materials and bridge’s structure.
In the same way, web-based businesses like these require nothing less than constant, dedicated optimisation for maximum natural search impact if they are to survive and thrive in the online economy.
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